Flash flooding causes accidents throughout Lehigh Valley

Severe weather that brought heavy rains that caused roads to flood passed through the Lehigh Valley on Monday night.

Severe weather that brought heavy rains that caused roads to flood passed through the Lehigh Valley on Monday night.

Tracy Jordan, Of The Morning Call

Flash floods throughout the Lehigh Valley caused several traffic accidents, but few injuries Monday evening.

In Allentown, a car became stuck in deep water under a railroad bridge on South Eighth Street, south of Tioga Street, at 6:25 p.m. Reinaldo Varona, 62, of Brooklyn, N.J., was able to free himself unhurt from the car.

Varona's car later was towed from the scene.

In South Whitehall, a passenger was reported trapped in a car after the vehicle hit a utility pole 10:05 p.m. at Mauch Chunk Road and Presidential Drive. Rescue workers had to avoid downed wires as they freed the passenger.

The car's driver and passenger were taken to the hospital.

Several traffic signals were knocked out and nearly 800 homes and businesses in South Whitehall lost power while a PPL crew repaired the power lines.

Most of the accidents reported Monday night did not involve injuries.

The cooler temperatures were expected after Monday's showers. This week's lowest high temperatures will be around 80 and the lowest low temperatures will be around 60. That's just a few degrees off July's normal mean high of 84.2 and normal mean low of 62.7.

Even the Midwest is not going into deep freeze. The Midwest is expected to experience fall-like temperatures that are 10-20 degrees below normal.

Most of us first heard the term polar vortex during January's extremely cold weather.

As it turns out, January's bitter cold temperatures also may or may not have been a result of a polar vortex depending on how technical your understanding of polar jet streams or which meteorologist you trust. But this polar vortex, is definitely not a polar vortex, according to nearly all of the experts.

Apparently, it's just a mass of cold air from the Northeast Pacific.

Polar vortexes (or vortices depending on your spelling preference for plurals ending in "x") are large cold air masses above the atmosphere at the north and south poles.

NBC Weekend TODAY weather anchor Dylan Dreyer decided to call it a "polar intrusion," but says calling it a polar vortex is useful in conveying a general message.

"If someone asks you what the weather will be this week and you tell them you heard the polar vortex is returning, they'll know it's going to be a little chillier than normal," Dreyer writes in her report. "It's kitschy, it's flashy, it's pop culture at this point — and it's also absurd and entirely inaccurate — but people get it and realize what it represents."

There are now even Twitter hashtags to say it is #NotaPolarVortex and to #StopPolarVortexAbuse,

According to The Washington Post, all the talk about a polar vortex bubbled up from two National Weather Service bureaus, but they were told to stop using the term saying the cold air is the result of a "deep upper low" not a polar vortex.

Despite all this, this weather event is still newsworthy – especially if you live in the Midwest or hoped to vacation on the Great Lakes this week.

Kelton Halbert at TempestStormChasing.com provides an in-depth explanation that points to remnants of Typhoon Neoguri in the Pacific for causing the unusually cool air in July.